The Wilderness

In 2008, Desiree, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood and of big city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood—overwhelming, mysterious and full of freedom and consequences—swoops in and stays.

Desiree is estranged from her sister Danielle, and the two nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January's got a relationship with a 'good' man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life.

As these friends transition from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern life.

The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy's masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.

'Flournoy is singular.' — Raven Leilani

'Wonderfully ambitious... A voice that is expansive yet intimate, humorous yet devastating.' — Brit Bennett

'Flournoy has a long-lens talent, capable of spanning great distances while keeping her characters in crisp, but always compassionate, focus.' — Eleanor Catton

'Gorgeously written with clear-sighted vision by one of the wisest, most talented authors working today.' — Justin Torres

'Takes twenty-first-century black womanhood on a wild ride, and just keeps getting wilder. A triumphant whirlwind of a novel.' — Namwali Serpell

'Inhabits a quartet of shifting perspectives with wit, tenderness and exquisite grace... Flournoy's account of the emotional vicissitudes of friendship and its endurance evokes the hushed, disconsolate quality of [Toni] Morrison.' — New York Times

'A future classic.' — Harper's Bazaar